


To See the Light

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 07:59:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For cataradical's fun Valentine's exchange thingie, for tumblr member Hottiebots.   Thanks to ladyofdragons for betaing!</p>
            </blockquote>





	To See the Light

There was only so much even Drift could do in a narrow space: it was the downside of swordfighting that you kind of needed some room to swing them.  That, plus the slow erosion of confidence on skill, and sheer numbers of the Galactic Council troopers crowding in through the airlock, and Drift was done.

Not the heroic showing he’d hoped to put on, but at least there was no one to witness it, as they massed over him, tearing the swords from his hands, binding his wrists tightly behind his back, tight enough that the red-scalloped spaulders grated together behind his shoulders. After all this time, a prisoner.

And no one would save him this time.

The Autobots all thought he’d—no, he’d let them think, he’d all but made them think it—that he’d been the only one responsible for Overlord.  He was expendable, he’d thought, but still, it hurt how quickly everyone had turned on him, as if their suspicions all along were verified, that he was still a Decepticon, still half-savage, not to be trusted.

It hurt, but nothing compared to the slow burn he’d felt on the small shuttle, how tiny and insignificant he was in the vastness of space, refuse, flung from the aftermath of the war.  He’d wanted, even back in Rodion, to be important, to matter. And he’d been cast off, a willing scapegoat, but a scapegoat nonetheless, used and discarded. Life moved on without him and he floated like detritus in the huge cauldron of space.

Until the _Benign Intervention_ had found him.

The guards chattered in some language he couldn’t follow, hauling him to his feet by raising his arms, straining against his shoulder joints. He wobbled, half-blind with pain, walking doubled over from the stress of the position, barely able to focus on the alternation of deckplates, the slow flashes of his feet as they led him somewhere. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore: alone, unarmed, what did anything matter?

A burble of sound, and the hiss of a forcefield dropping, and then Drift’s weight got flung forward, shoving him into a darkness. A cell.

He stumbled, landing heavily on his knees, metal scraping against plascrete, barely registering until too late that they’d freed his hands.  A small freedom for a larger captivity. It didn’t matter. There was no point trying to escape. You only escaped if you had something to do, somewhere to go.  

Drift rolled to his side, turning to the cell door, already re-activated, the forcefield shimmering the air between them. They gave him the looks of disdain and loathing he remembered from the Rodion gutters, from the Lost Light crew, before moving off, as though he was worth nothing, now, harmless, neutralized.

He sat back, weary, scooting back till his shoulders found a wall, feeling his body curl forward into a knot of something like despair, the pain from about twenty different dents and wounds massing together like a cloud of pain and there was nothing to do but let the rain of it fall on him.

Until the voice, from his left, deeper in the shadows of the cell.

“…I thought I was the only one.”

[***]

Wing moved forward, from the shadows, slowly, as he had to move now, careful not to stress the small power generator that kept him alive.  He’d seen the guards arrive, and shrank back, fearing another round of interrogations, another endless-seeming span in the room of bright lights and agony.  His flightpanels felt almost rusted together, sore from disuse, just another daily pain to remind him he was alive, and theirs.  

The other mech turned toward the sound of Wing’s voice, and for a moment, Wing seemed to teeter on the brink of recognition, something hauntingly familiar about the lines of the helm, the shape of the optics.  

No. It couldn’t be.

“Wing?” He spoke, then, the other mech, and removed all doubt, and Wing watched Drift uncoil, rising to his feet, hands tentatively outstretched as though seeing a ghost.

Wing felt like a ghost, something that hadn’t truly lived since Theophany, since that battle. Still, it was Drift, wounded, but alive, different, but the same, the first familiar voice he’d heard in ages. “Yes,” he said, admitting, though ashamed.

“But how--?”

“They came to Crystal City.  After the Legislators. They found me—my body—and thought I knew something.” He shook his head. He hadn’t known anything, about the Legislators, about the loss of his city. His tomb had been destroyed under the Legislators’ assault, but they’d presumed he was freshly dead. It was a terrible resurrection, to come back to find everything you’d lived and died for had been destroyed.  Wing’s fingers brushed one of the cables that snaked around his chassis, ugly and marring. “This keeps me alive.”

The hands moved again, brushing the cable, hating and loving it for a moment, and Drift’s other hand rested on Wing’s shoulder, blue optics hungry like a mech starved in the gutters knew hunger, devouring Wing, even ruined like this. It was as if nothing could ruin Drift’s idea of Wing.

And maybe, Wing thought, Drift was seeing him true, seeing him as he was, as he should be again, and these last years had been Wing himself lost without community, a knight without his cause, and Drift was calling him back to himself.

“But you,” Wing said, moving his own hands, ghosting over the scraped paint on Drift’s chassis. “Alone.”

Drift nodded, and there was a storm of pain behind his gaze, a story he wasn’t ready to tell.  “What do they want from us? It’s the Galactic Council, right?”

Wing felt the generator stress: he’d been standing too long, feeling too much for it. He eased himself back, and down onto the ground, Drift following, kneeling beside him, worry unmistakable on his face. Wing shrugged off the concern. “I tried too hard to escape, in the past. They keep my energy very limited.”  He managed a wan smile, taking a hand Drift offered, squeezing it as though gaining strength from the contact. He could see something stir behind Drift’s optics, but this time, it wasn’t pain, it was anger, hot and piercing.  Anger at them, for Wing.  The concern kindled something in Wing’s spark, a forgotten wonderful pain, the feeling of someone else caring about you.

“As to the other, I don’t know what they want. They fear the Legislators, and who is behind them.  They fear all our kind.”

“Noticed that,” Drift said, wryly. “They tried to destroy our ship.” He stopped himself, but it was too late.

“Our? You’re not alone?”

Drift shook his head. “I wasn’t. I am now.  Long story.” Meaning, clearly, he didn’t want to talk about it.

“You’re not alone now,” Wing said, pushing as much strength in his voice as he could. He felt Drift’s hand tighten in his, a bond newly forged between them.

[***]

“My sword,” Drift said, gesticulating and speaking in the loud and slow way you speak when talking to someone you figure can’t understand you. He’d been at it, insistent enough, that the initial team of guards had given up, brought in their shift captain, and now, Drift was face to face, only the forcefield between them, with K’gard himself.

He’d recognize the stupid hat anywhere.

“I do speak NeoCybex,” K’gard said, frowning. Maybe frowning. It was kind of hard to tell with his whole…face thing.  But it was clear it was kind of supposed to be an insult.  “Do you think we’re going to give you—a Cybertronian—a weapon?”

Well, it had been worth a shot, Drift thought.  But no, probably not.  He knew K’gard wouldn’t, if the situation were reversed, give him a weapon.  “It’s not a weapon, though,” he said. Because despite what Ultra Magnus thought—and said—he did plan things and he had been paying attention. “It’s a cultural artifact.”

“Cultural artifact,” K’gard said—well, kind of sneered, really.  In a sort of ‘do you think I’m that stupid’ way that reminded Drift a little too much of Turmoil.  

“It’s true,” Wing said. Drift hadn’t told him what the plan was—such as the plan was, really—but he spoke up from the shadows, shuffling into the lighter shadows at the cell’s front. “You know I can’t lie, K’gard.”  He was a knight: he was sworn to the truth, no matter what.

K’gard’s scowl grew by a few orders of magnitude. Any bigger and he’d need a bigger face. Which was possibly the most terrifying thought Drift had had in a long time.

“Great Swords threaten the wielder as much, if not more, than those in front of them. And besides, do I look like I can fight?” Wing said, fighting the wobble in his balance.  It hurt Drift to see Wing so weak, barely able to stand. He couldn’t fight, not like this. And that was why he wanted the Great Sword.  It was just a theory, just a long shot, but if Primus had sent him down so many wrong roads, one of them had to turn right. And if he could ask for one, this would be it.

“I could cite you the paragraphs from the Accord,” Drift said. A bluff, because he didn’t remember it from when Ultra Magnus had invoked it back on the Lost Light.  Just a bunch of numbers and letters and stuff.  But he knew how to look like he meant what he said, and K’Gard tapped his teeth for a long moment, before grunting.

“Very well,” K’gard said. “But this is the agreement: if that Sword harms any of my troops, both of you pay the price.” He stepped back, his scowl turning into a smirk, as though he’d caught them in a trap.

[***]

“Lie down,” Drift said. He was holding the Great Sword carefully between his hands, optics coruscating with emotion.

“Drift, are you sure this will work?”

No, he wasn’t sure. But he had to do something, because seeing Wing like this, so weak, so frail…he had to do something. And this was the only thing he could think of.  He didn’t lie, even though he hadn’t taken the Knights’ oath to honesty, but he let it go at a nod.  

Wing’s graphite hand wrapped around his, and he could feel the warmth, the satin finish of the armor. He almost shivered: it had been so long since anyone had touched him, much less tenderly.  He looked over, blue optics meeting the pale straw-colored seas of Wing’s.  “Drift,” he said, quietly, “It’s okay if I die.”  Agreement to the plan, absolving Drift of any consequences. “I’d rather try.”

No, it’s not okay, Drift thought, truculent and hard, the same stubbornness that had rooted into him in Rodion. “Don’t talk like that.” He sounded almost angry, thrusting the very idea that this would fail out of the realm of possibility. He wouldn’t allow it. It would work, through sheer force of Drift’s will.  

He’d feel a lot better if Perceptor were here. Or Ratchet. Even Brainstorm. Anyone with some sort of technological competence.  He was a fighter, a killer. Healing…wasn’t on his resume. “Look, you said the Great Swords access the spark’s energy when they’re used, right?”  Wing nodded. “And…and you were holding it when Braid—“ He shook his head, cutting off the end of the sentence, though the meaning of it dropped between them like a stone.  

Wing’s brow furrowed, under his helm, and Drift’s throat caught. Wing was here and alive, or alive enough that it would be agony to lose him. This was a risk. A huge risk.  

But you won nothing if you never risked anything.

“I was,” Wing said, prompting him, and then, even as he said the words, the rest of Drift’s plan popped into his head: his spark had flared in his death, while his hand had been connected to the Sword’s crystal.  Wing's hand reached for the Sword, eagerly now, nodding away any further explanation.  He’d lived, here, because what choice did he have, but he was never a solitary mech, and the loneliness had been killing him as much as the slow starvation of the powercell.  And here was Drift, burning and intense, like a light of life itself, lighting all the darkness.  He’d give anything to keep that.  

“Right,” Drift said, handing the hilt to Wing, reverently, returning it to its true owner, as far as he was concerned.  Wing’s hand closed over the hilt, and the jewel flared in the darkness, like one of the Theophany suns brought into the narrow cell with them.  

And then…nothing.

Wing couldn’t mask the disappointment on his face, the expression of one who had grasped at a prize and felt it slip through his fingers.  “Drift….” An apology was on the edge of his lip plates, but Drift shook his head, defying reality, refusing to give up.

“Again,” Drift said, frowning and desperate, and he folded his hand over Wing’s, loaning his own strength, his own spark, into the process.  

The sword flared again, gold and blue, flickering together like the heart of a flame, and Wing cried out, feeling a burning rise in his chassis, a pain and pleasure, the pure hard force of life itself. He pulled Drift closer, chassis to chassis, clinging to him with his free hand, the Great Sword pressed between them, hands joined. There was a shower of sparks, little burning things, as the power cell shorted out under the current, and the acrid sting of its shorted connections was the most beautiful scent in the world to Wing, because he was done with the hateful thing, and alive fully and freely, for the first time in ages.

[***]

They spent the night twined together, almost chastely for all that. This was not the place for intimacy: Drift didn’t want his first time to be here, to be captives. They would become lovers when they were free of this place, he thought.  Freely chosen, a celebration of joy, instead of something to ward off despair.  

But he couldn’t deny himself the joy of clinging to the jet, burrowing his face in the other’s neck, feeling him melt against his chassis.  They didn’t need to talk about their pasts: those no longer mattered. Only now, and only the future. They didn’t have a plan, not yet, but they had something more important than that, more important than hope: they had someone to live for.  And together, they’d be unstoppable.


End file.
